Title
“In my restless dreams, I see that town”. Fan translating, curating and recontextualizing horror games
Conference name
XXI KäTu symposium on translation and interpreting studies
City
Country
Finland
Modalities
Date
19/04/2024-20/04/2024
Abstract
This study attempts to map the intricate dynamics of the interplay between fan translators’ gaming capital (Consalvo: 2007) and the fan translation aided prosumption ecosystem of horror games in Turkey context. The investigation unfolds on two levels: firstly, at the community level, the focus is on Silent Hill Türkiye, a discontinued forum dedicated to the renowned survival horror franchise Silent Hill content. Secondly, the study explores the role of Tansel Altınel, the subcultural celebrity and fan translator of prominent horror titles including the Silent Hill series, Amnesia series, Dear Esther, and SOMA. Altınel's diverse fan engagement activities, including the translation of the Silent Hill official novel, curation of Silent Hill Playlists, creation of Silent Hill mods, and the production of paratextual content on the Silent Hill series, offers a telling example of the fan translators’ pivotal role in unofficial circulation and the recontextualization of fan translated artefacts. This aspect, the agents’ role in fan translation ecosystem, remains relatively underexplored within existing fan translation research literature, which overwhelmingly focuses its lenses on the communal aspects of translation practices (Karagöz: 2022).
Sketching an overall picture of discussion, this paper adopts the paratextual analysis to investigate Altınel's accounts published on his website and the netnographic gaze (Kozinets: 2019) to unravel fan translation consumers’ engagement with fan labour based on user comments about Altınel’slanguage patches and translations in various forums. The findings suggest that fan translation activities may extend beyond the mere act of translating to the lack of official localization. Instead, the fandom driven labour may have a pivotal role in curating, recontextualizing, archiving and, when necessary, updating the translated content, which eventually translates into accumulating and showcasing the gaming capital. Moreover, fan translation may play a pivotal role in shaping a vibrant fan ecosystem, wherein both the consumption, production and prosumption of translated content foster a symbiotic relationship between consumers and creators, effectively bridging the gap between enthusiasts and the broader gaming community. This paper also implies that future research could attempt to explore the nuanced impact of fan translation on the cultivation and evolution of fan cultures.
Sketching an overall picture of discussion, this paper adopts the paratextual analysis to investigate Altınel's accounts published on his website and the netnographic gaze (Kozinets: 2019) to unravel fan translation consumers’ engagement with fan labour based on user comments about Altınel’slanguage patches and translations in various forums. The findings suggest that fan translation activities may extend beyond the mere act of translating to the lack of official localization. Instead, the fandom driven labour may have a pivotal role in curating, recontextualizing, archiving and, when necessary, updating the translated content, which eventually translates into accumulating and showcasing the gaming capital. Moreover, fan translation may play a pivotal role in shaping a vibrant fan ecosystem, wherein both the consumption, production and prosumption of translated content foster a symbiotic relationship between consumers and creators, effectively bridging the gap between enthusiasts and the broader gaming community. This paper also implies that future research could attempt to explore the nuanced impact of fan translation on the cultivation and evolution of fan cultures.